Predicting the Future with Social Media (SoNet slides)

During our weekly SoNet internal research meeting, my colleague Napo presented the paper “Predicting the Future With Social Media” by Sitaram Asur and Bernardo A. Huberman, archived on arXiv in March 2010. Using Twitter posts, they are able to forecast box-office revenues for movies, outperforming market-based predictors. They also do sentimental analysis on Twits by asking Mechanical Turk to tag few twits as positive, neutral, negative and then they train LingPipe to predict the positiveness of all the other millions of twits. Read it! Very interesting paper!